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Wednesday, August 24, 2005

What I did on my summer holiday (1)

Saturday morning -- The Cambridge Tolkien society are doing their dramatic reading (actually, a full scale performance with singing and sound effects) of highlights from the Brian Sibley radio adaptation of Lord of the Rings. We have got as far as Shelob's lair. And I'll need your star-glass Mr Frodo; you did lend it to me, and I'll need it, for I'll be always in the dark now... I glance around the audience to confirm I'm not the only person who appears (inexplicably) to have something in their eye.

Over the course of the convention, I think I attended a total of 33 (*) lectures on different aspects of Lord of the Rings. It is doubtless very interesting and important to learn about the root of the elvish word for 'tree', to wonder about the influence that Shakespeare or William Morris might have had Tolkien's writing; or to compare Melkor with Milton's Satan. (They were both evil. The end.) I am even prepared to own up to a little light filking. But it was nice to be reminded of why the 50th anniversary of the publication of the Lord of the Rings is an event worth commemorating. Just how many books are there which, even on the twentieth reading, can still make you laugh and cry. Sometimes on the same page. Sometimes at the exact same moment. Now sir, you shouldn't laugh. I was being serious.

Saturday lunchtime -- Stagger out of Martin Barker's lecture on sociology, thinking 'I now have a spare hour to get some lunch.' Find printout pinned to door saying 'Extra talk: Michael Scott Rohan on Tolkien and Wagner.' It was that kind of weekend.

The root of the elvish word for 'Tree' is the same as the root of the elvish word for 'Light'.

Some people imagine Elvish to be an artificial language, the sort of thing that you could learn and have a conversation in, like Klingon and Esperanto. In fact, Tolkien left only a grammatical structure and a few hundred words of his made up languages. His primary interest was in philology. How language develop; how words form; how mythology informs language and language informs mythology.

(The award for 'lecture I understood least of' goes to the promisingly entitled 'Tolkien as I knew him', which turned out to be an elderly Swedish academic explaining the finer points of the Anglo-Saxon and middle English PhD that Tolkien had supervised him in. But it contained one fascinating scholarly anecdote: Tolkien met a French academic, and was able to say to him 'I expect in your dialect you pronounce such-and-such a word in such-and-such a way' -- purely by applying the rules of philology and sound change)

Within the mythos of the Silmarillion, 'the light that was before the Sun and the Moon' came from the Two Trees of Valinor: so of course 'tree' and 'light' are the same word... because they are the same concept. (c.f Gil-galad, star-light; Galadhrim, tree-people.) In a lecture entitled 'Galadhremmin Ennorath', John Christie pointed out that the images of 'trees' and 'light' are consistently connected in all of Tolkien's writings from the terribly early poems about Earendal down to the Lord of the Rings and beyond. And there is also an association between light and hair: (Galadriel's hair is said to resemble the light of the Two Trees) and between light and gems (Feanor captured some of the light of the Trees in the holy gems known as Silmarils). One example of the images appearing in conjunction occurs in Sam's song in Cirith Ungol – shortly after he has taken Galadriel's star-glass from Frodo:

Or there may be tis cloudless nightand swaying beeches bearthe Elven-stars as jewels whiteamid their branching hair.

This kind of thing almost scares me. Lord of the Rings is so dense; Tolkien put so much into the book without drawing attention to it. In fact, he probably didn't 'put it in' at all: light and trees and hairs and jewels just come out together because he is thinking in Elvish. How much more of this stuff would there be to discover if I knew more Quenya?

Friday Night : The Cambridge Tolkien Society also revived their 'Reduced Silmarillion Company' revue, which was first performed at Oxonmoot in 2002. There are not too many social settings in which you could get uproarious laughter out of, say, the textual history of 'The Fall of Gondolin' while depicting the Silmarils as three cans of beer. The story of Beren and Luthien was done in pantomime style rhyming couplets, but it appears that some real lines from the 'Ley of Lethian' were smuggled in.

It was a lot funnier than I am probably making it sound.

But I wonder who had the brilliant idea of staging this satyr play first, and following it up with the Greek Tolkien society's extremely serious performance entitled either 'Oedipus and Turin' or 'Doom and Fate: where myths meet.' It will be remembered that both Turin and Oedipus marry a close family member, and both of them have a black sword, apart from Oedipus. I take my mithril coat off to the Greek people: can you imagine a group of Brits saying 'I know, when we go to the Athens Tolkien convention, we'll put on a play involving some excerpts from the Silmarillion and some excerpts from Hamlet. And in case that's too easy, we'll do it in Greek.' A fairly literal dramatisation of the last few pages of Turin's story made out a pretty good case for it structurally resembling a Greek tragedy (messengers coming in with terrible news and begging to be allowed to keep silent, and all that). The substantial excerpt from Oedipus Rex made better theater; presumably because Sophocles was a slightly better playwright than Tolkien. This successfully made the point about the difference between Doom and Fate. Turin marries his sister because the malicious dragon wants to harm in, and because Morgoth has cursed him. Oedipus marries his mother because...well, because life's like that and fate's a bastard.

But still, I felt sorry for the guy playing Turin. He walked onto the stage in a pretty good costume and started declaiming serious lines at a pasteboard dragon, and all anyone in the audience (well, me at any rate) could think of was the R.S.C version we'd seen ten minutes before in which Turin was depicted as an over-enthusiastic school-boy delivering lines like 'I know, I think I'll go forty leagues out of my way in order to commit a pointless act of genocide against a civilian population'!

Thursday: Inexplicably, all conventions have opening 'ceremonies'; equally inexplicably, people go to them. It's the only point at which all attendees are assembled in one place, and can be addressed by the convention committee. I'm glad I showed up this time. The 'one or two surprises' turned out to be a short speech by Priscilla Tolkien, the Professor's daughter. Priscilla sometimes feels a little like the Tolkien society's equivalent of the Queen Mother. At the Oxford conventions, the society committee is always very protective of her -- clearly, a very old lady doesn't want to be mobbed by fanboys, or more importantly, by journalists. According to tradition, I was briefly introduced to her at my first Oxonmoot, but it was nice to hear her make an actual speech, and even better, to hear her do a brief question-and-answer session in a packed lecture hall the next day. Not surprisingly, she politely avoided all controversial and scholarly questions -- but it was extremely moving to hear the little domestic details.

To think: we are actually in the same room as the little girl who first received the Father Christmas letters. All a bit overwhelming, really.

It appears that we have learned to stop worrying and love Peter Jackson.

Well, that may be an exaggeration. When we are consciously or specifically debating the movie, we are likely to be very critical of it. Priscilla told a story about having re-typed the early chapters of Lord of the Rings for her father, and being terrified to the point of nightmares by the Black Riders. Someone asked if she had seen the movies. With her very English (almost headmistressy) tact, she said that she would 'rather not go into that'. The questioner just wondered if she had still found the Black Rider's frightening in the film. 'Oh, good God no!' she exclaimed, adding something about 'spectacle and sensation'.

Thunderous applause.

On the other hand, Martin Barker gave a talk about a massive sociology project which he is involved with, researching the impact of and response to the movies. His statistics show that the more times someone has read the book, the more likely they are to like the movies. Applause from floor. 'I wonder why you applauded?' he asked.

Voice from floor: 'Because there is too much Jackson bashing!' More applause.

(He has also discovered that people who first read the book in the 1960s are more likely to miss Tom Bombadil than people who read it more recently...)

But in general, the movies seem increasingly to be accepted as another text; a fact to be taken into account, a piece of data that you need to refer to. An American academic talking about 'The theme of sacrifice' mentioned that Frodo says to Galadriel 'I know what I must do, it's just I'm afraid to do it'....and left the lecture room relatively unscathed. This would not have been the case three years ago. The aforementioned talk about light and hair used stills from The Fellowship of the Ring alongside texts from The Book of Lost Tales. A very helpful piece in the 'religion' stream pointed out that although a lot of the specifically Christian elements of the book vanished from Jackson's screenplay, the film retained a lot of very Catholic looking visuals. (The evenstar looks like a cross or a traditional star of Bethlehem; Minas Tirith looks like a cathedral; Aragorn's mum looks like a Madonna; and the Red Book looks like a Bible.)

People wishing to stay up all night had the opportunity to watch the extended versions of the movies on a projection TV. On Day 3, the sign outside the video room offered a 'prize for the best heckle'. So we obviously haven't all made friends with movies. Maybe it's more of a watchful peace.

(My entry in the clerihew competition failed to win a prize.

Elijah Wood.Is not particularly good.His fidelity to the text is not exactly slavishBut at least he isn't John Rhys-Davies. )

A film-studies lecturer gave a talk on a soft-porn movie called Lord of the G-Strings, and for the first time ever, the Tolkien society admitted the existence of slash fiction.

Saturday: That journalist was spot on about the way the audience spontaneously mumbled along with Tom Shippey when he quoted All that is gold does not glitter / not all those who wander are lost. This is called 'spotting a telling detail', and is, I guess, how one gets to write feature pieces for the Guardian.

I have often wanted to present certain of my colleagues with a diagram of a human figure, with two labels, clearly delineating the 'arse' and the 'elbow.' In the same way, certain academics seem to require recognition guides enabling them to clearly distinguish between 'wood' and 'trees'. A very interesting scholarly lecture made out a good case for the 'endless knot' or pentangle on the shield of Sir Gawain in the middle-English poem 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' which Tolkien edited and translated having been recognisable to medieval English people as a three-men's Morris board. (Pentangles engraved in church pews are therefore less likely to be pagan survivals and more likely to be a means of passing time in boring sermons.) Someone from the floor got in before me with the obvious question: 'Is it significant that Gawain has a game-board on his shield, given that playing games is so much what the poem is all about?'. 'That hadn't occurred to me' said Mr Speaker.

Mr Film-Studies Man was surprised that we laughed when he referred to a character called 'Ara-porn' in Lord of the G-Strings. 'It didn't really occur to me that this stuff was funny,' he said.

As the weekend progresses, I started to feel that I didn't need to hear any more about how Tolkien was influenced by, or the influence he may have had upon, Shakespeare, William Morris, G.K Chesterton, Phillip Pulman and a large number of people I had never heard of. I am also not sure that I need to be told that, say, the myth of the Ents and the Entwives in some ways resembles modern gender politics and in other ways doesn't.

One occasionally ended up feeling sorry for the academics. It must be rare enough for them to be addressing students who have actually read the text under discussion; and unheard of to have an audience who have all read it dozens of times. One speaker made the mistake of implying that Frodo only goes to the Undying Lands in spirit, and had to deal with quotes from the Silmarillion in the question and answer session. Another one asked how anyone could possibly know the Rhyme of the Ring, since it was spoken by Sauron on Mount Doom...and lots of people told him.

A ten year moratorium should be established on referring to Tolkien's metaphor of the 'soup of story' in lectures about sources and influence.

Most obscure subject for a talk: 'Middle-earth re-enactment in Estonia'.

Tolkien never quite made up his mind about Galadriel's back-story. In one version, Feanor asks for three strands of her hair (which, it will be remembered, resembled the mingled light of the Two Trees.) She refuses him. Centuries later, Gimli unknowingly makes the same request. Because of his courtesy, she grants it to him. He says that if he survives the War of the Ring, he will preserve the threes hairs in imperishable crystal to be an heirloom of his house forever. At this point, Beth Russel, who was giving a talk entitled 'Galadriel and her lovers' speculated out loud; 'I wonder if he put them in one crystal, or in three.' I swear that there was a gasp of astonishment from the audience. Because, of course, three crystals, each containing a hair of Galadriel (which resemble the light of the Trees) would be an obvious symbol of the three Silmarils, which Feanor made, and which contain the actual light of the Trees. Given that Feanor made the Silmarils because Galadriel had refused him her hair, the symbolism is irresistible. I repeat. It scares me that Tolkien's legendarium (as we like to call it) has this much depth and complexity: that every time you study a passage, you find new connections which you hadn't spotted before.

'I bet there weren't any women there,' said a colleague by the water-cooler on Wednesday. Actually, I would have said the ratio of Ents to Entwives was very nearly 50/50; including married couples with kids; older looking people with grown-up children; aging hippies with scraggy beards; and someone with the badge-name 'Gramps.' On the other hand, despite the international flavour of the event it was, as the fellow said, hideously white. More people were inclined to begin sentences with '...at my church' or '...well, as a Christian, I...' than would probably be the case at a Star Trek convention. I was twice asked 'What's your field', expecting the answer 'What did you study at college?' not 'What's your job?'

Tolkien's books contain a lot of singing; and most of the songs have now got established tunes; I guess that everyone agrees the tune of Gil-Galad was an elven king is the one which Stephen Oliver wrote for it, despite that fact that someone demonstrated that it can be sung successfully to 'When the saints go marching in.'

At lunch time on the last day, there was an impromptu musical session in the canteen on the top floor. Some of it was more or less normal convention filking; Tolkien fans being as capable of silliness as anyone else. (Thar's been a courtin Pippin Took / On Ettenmoor bah t'at etc etc etc.) There's also been an outbreak of rather good Beatles filks which I sadly didn't get the words of. (All you need are rings, rings, rings are all you need.)

But before long, someone was doing a heartbreaking Bilbo's Last Song in a version I didn't know, and someone stood up and did In Western Lands un-accompanied.

The truth is, of course, that conventions are the normal and sensible part of life, and everything outside them is crazy. What could be more rational than an environment where everyone knows the same corpus of stories and wants to study them, talk about them, make up serious plays about, burlesque them, sing about them; where everyone can be assumed to be friends with everyone else because everyone loves the same things. It seemed rather a shame to have to go back to the weird fantasy world where you have to interact with people who don't love Lord of the Rings.

Quotes.

"The title of my talk is "Pennas Echuir Enydon", on the origin of the ents. Yes, I came all the way from America to show you my Pennas."

"Tolkien said that he cordially disliked allegory, which must have made writing Leaf by Niggle a very unpleasant experience for him."

"How is it that everybody says that they don't read slash, and then goes on to make generalisations about it?"

"I was doing some research into Star Trek fans....Don't laugh. People laugh at you."

"Well, he didn't like spiders, but I never heard him mention beetles..." (Priscilla, answering a question on Tolkien's attitude to the popular music of the 1960s.)

(*) Frodo as Sacrificial Hero; Tolkien: the critic and the fiction writer; Invented and Borrowed Myths; Tolkien and Williams; Wise Sayings in Lord of the Rings; Tolkien as I knew him; The Science of Lord of the Rings; Tolkien's lunar creation myth; Influence of Climate on myth; the loss of the Entwives; Tolkien's theory of reading; WWI and the passage of the Dead Marshes; Tolkien in Fiction; Tolkien and Oral Tradition; LOTR international audience project; Tolkein and Wagner; Peter Jackson and catholicism; Tolkien and Christianity; Satan and Melkor; An ecumenical approach to Tolkien; Tolkien the pagan; Tolkein Dirty: The Lord of the Rings and sexploitation movies; the Inklings in their political context; the Question of the Round Arda; Death and Mortality; 'Galadhremmin Ennorath; Sir Gawain's pentangle; Hobbit names aren' from Kentucky; They might have been giants (the origin of the ents) ; Snergs, Hobbits and Pygmies; Narratorial authority in Lord of the Rings; Tolkien and Shakespeare; Galadriel and Her Lovers; the Ace Copyright Affair; Tolkien in the 60s.

If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider buying a copy of Do Balrogs Have Wings?, which contains all my essays on Lewis and Tolkien, including some previously unpublished.
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24 comments:

One occasionally ended up feeling sorry for the academics. It must be rare enough for them to be addressing students who have actually read the text under discussion; and unheard of to have an audience who have all read it dozens of times. One speaker made the mistake of implying that Frodo only goes to the Undying Lands in spirit, and had to deal with quotes from the Silmarillion in the question and answer session. Another one asked how anyone could possibly know the Rhyme of the Ring, since it was spoken by Sauron on Mount Doom...and lots of people told him.

This phenomenon reminds me of reading some academic texts on "Star Trek" and Stephen King. (There are some diverse topics for you.) As often seems to be the case when dealing with what one might describe as pop culture, some academics manage to comment on the text without reading it carefully at all. They overgeneralize, they decontextualize, they even misspell names. On a Stephen King novel, one writer says that a character never even suggests that A or B is a possible scenario, and that this is revealing about King's gender politics; I stop and immediately recall that both A and B are explicitly suggested. It's a bit embarassing.

I recall once reading a book about the rise of pseudoreligions, written during the sixties, in which the author, discussing the cult following of Tolkien's work, referred to Hobbits as having hooves. Like Mark Twain said (approximately), it seems unfair to comment on Tolkien's work without having read some of it.

One occasionally ended up feeling sorry for the academics. It must be rare enough for them to be addressing students who have actually read the text under discussion;

My 8th Grade English Teacher actually tried to explain to us how the Lord of the Rings was an allegory of the second world war...I had my copy of 'Fellowship' on hand with the pertinent forward.

Why did you go? Not being a convention goer myself I don't really understand why folks go. Is it for education or entertainment, or a bit of both? Observing Trekkies from the outside I get the impression that it is just a chance to wear spock ears and not be looked at funny. This sounds a bit more involved though. What did you hope to accomplish and did you accomplish it?

Er..I guess I went because I've been to Oxonmoot in the past and enjoyed it. Although if "wearing spock-ears in public" means "hanging out with like minded people", then that is part of it. Think "study day, workshop, conference, but with parties and silly games" and you won't go too far wrong.

Someone once raised the question of people who dress up as wizards and Klingons with Terry Pratchett, who said something along the lines of "They don't dress like that all the time, you know. They're on holiday."

The Fellowship of the Ring *is* an allegory of the Second World War. Just not intentionally...

I should say that I have been to one Star Trek convention about 12 years ago. There just wasn't all that much to do. It was like going to a specialized flee market where a couple of famous people stood up to speak at one point.I appreciate the fun of hanging out with like-minded people, I am just thinking that what you describe seems rather a bit more interesting than only that. The lectures sound engaging. Some of the silly stuff you describe sounds fun. I appreciate you describing it. I confess that I had never heard of Oxonmoot before.

I guess I was mostly asking if this was 'just' a convention, in which case I have perhaps misjudged conventions and think I might try one again, or if it is a cut above, in which case I might have to one day make a pilgrimage.

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I understood that much of the story of Lord of the Rings was already pretty well developed prior to WWII. In what way do you mean that it is an allegory of it?

If you mean in a very abstract sense then I would guess that you could call it an allegory of pretty much any war fought. But I am not sure you can really apply it. I don't see the common theme between WWII and the War of the Ring.

As Tolkien himself stated, were it a direct allegory then the fellowship would have used the ring against Sauron and the Shire would never have been restored.

Perhaps you could draw the allegory that the hobbits, a quiet nation of rustics (shop keepers and farmers) represent Britain and they go off to take part in this great war with great nations, but that's really stretching. Britain was a great Empire at the time; in the sunset of being the greatest power in the world.

I am an Engineer, not a philosopher, and so I am missing what keener eyes I am sure see.

So I'm not saying you're wrong. I assume that you have more wisdom here than I do. Perhaps you would be willing to share the perspective of liberal rather than technical education?

In his book Crypnomicon, Neal Stephenson refers to WWII as a 'titanomachia' - referring originally to Zeus devouring his father Titan and establishing a new celestial order, but applied more widely as an event in which the shape of the world is irrevocably changed. LOTR describes such an upheaval. WWII was such an event. It might be more accurate to say that our perception of WWII fits into the same story-mold as LOTR.

(Cryptonomicon is a really good book, by the way, with lots of references to LOTR. The main character, for example, classifies everyone he meets as a LOTR character type - he's a dwarf, his girlfriend and her liberal-arts college types are hobbits, his math genius grandfather was an elf, and when he meets the mysterious stranger who's been helping and encouraging him in his endeavors, he writes to his friend that he's met a wizard. I though for a while that Stephenson's Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, The System of the World) would continue the parallel, and indeed the early segments are almost a scene-by-scene reenactment of "A Long Expected Party", but that quickly fell by the wayside.)

Perhaps you could draw the allegory that the hobbits, a quiet nation of rustics (shop keepers and farmers) represent Britain and they go off to take part in this great war with great nations, but that's really stretching. Britain was a great Empire at the time; in the sunset of being the greatest power in the world.

It's generally accepted that the allegory equates Britain with the elves - the old stewards of the world, whose time has ended. They join in the fight against evil one last time, and hand over the reigns of power to Men - the US. Hobbits, and their way of life in the Shire, are also considered allegorical, in this case representing the end of the pastoral way of life. It's not a perfect one-to-one equation, but that's probably all to the good.

But the hobbits don't end their pastoral way of life. They repair the shire and go on about life as if nothing had changed. One almost gets the impression, if one seeks such an allegory, that Tolkien meant to change the Shire into an industrial nation, but didn't have the heart in the end.

The pastoral life continues, the machines of Saruman are torn down. The good king Aragorn even restores Gondor somewhat and brings Elves and Dwarves into the land to rework some old crafts. Rebuild and replant.

You are right that both have the very broad theme that the world has changed, but the change wrought by Tolkien's War of the Ring is incomplete. It does not usher in a new industrial age of machines and technology. If there is a theme of WWII, then it is closer to Nietzsche's theme of those who fight monsters becoming them. The great industrial nation of Germany was beaten, not by the pure hearts of a few, but by other industrial nations.

Is there some generally accepted scholarly wisdom on the subject that I am missing?

No, there is no accepted scholarly wisdom about LR being an allegory, other than that it isn't one, not of World War II or of anything, though of course events of Tolkien's own lifetime and experience of course had influence on the writing, including the two world wars.

I've been been a Tolkien fan since I first discovered LR in the early 60s, even edited and partly wrote a book on Tolkien, and have never before heard the idea that the Elves represented the British empire, much less that this is "generally accepted". Who accepts it? In the earliest drafts of LR, the Elves were already leaving Middle-earth, and had been leaving Middle-earth for millenia. The ancient Elvish kingdoms at their height have no resemblance to the British Empire at any period.

What allegorists can't seem to understand is that Elves are primarily simply Elves, Dwarves are primarily simply Dwarves, and so forth. That is one of the reasons many academics can't take LR seriously: it doesn't especially point to anything beyond itself, doesn't have a coherent symbolic system which relates to the real world, is not an allegory, is not a dystopian tale, is not a utopian tale, and does not encode the personal life of the author.

No, there is no accepted scholarly wisdom about LR being an allegory, other than that it isn't one, not of World War II or of anything, though of course events of Tolkien's own lifetime and experience of course had influence on the writing, including the two world wars.

I've been been a Tolkien fan since I first discovered LR in the early 60s, even edited and partly wrote a book on Tolkien, and have never before heard the idea that the Elves represented the British empire, much less that this is "generally accepted". Who accepts it? In the earliest drafts of LR, the Elves were already leaving Middle-earth, and had been leaving Middle-earth for millenia. The ancient Elvish kingdoms at their height have no resemblance to the British Empire at any period.

What allegorists can't seem to understand is that Elves are primarily simply Elves, Dwarves are primarily simply Dwarves, and so forth. That is one of the reasons many academics can't take LR seriously: it doesn't especially point to anything beyond itself, doesn't have a coherent symbolic system which relates to the real world, is not an allegory, is not a dystopian tale, is not a utopian tale, and does not encode the personal life of the author.

Sorry for starting this. I was really only making an off-hand remark... Saying "allegory" and "Tolkien" in the same sentence is probably asking for trouble in the same was as saying "Sim" and "point". The "Lord of the Rings" can be read, if you like, as an allegory of WWII. But that certainly doesn't exhaust its meaning. And one-to-one resemblances, of the "Sauron = Hitler; Gandalf=Winston Churchill; Eowyn=Vera Lynne" kind are pretty obviously silly.

it doesn't especially point to anything beyond itself, doesn't have a coherent symbolic system which relates to the real world, is not an allegory, is not a dystopian tale, is not a utopian tale, and does not encode the personal life of the author.

This, I think, is simply untrue; Tolkien himself talks about Elrond as an allegory of lore, Lembas as an allegory or the eucharist, Galadriel as being connected with the Virgin Mary, the Eregion elves representing science and machinery; Saruman representing industrialisation; Tom Bombadil as the spirit of the vanishing Oxfordshire countryside; etc etc etc.

Well, I'll be, all conventions really are the same. I've done the Rocky Horror cons and the sci-fi ones and the occasional Dorothy L. Sayers con (bit more sedate, those), and there might not be much Naked Twister at the Tolkien con (I'm assuming) or many academic papers presented at the Rocky Horror con, but it's all of a piece...

Meanwhile:

for the first time ever, the Tolkien society admitted the existence of slash fiction.

As Tolkien himself stated, were it a direct allegory then the fellowship would have used the ring against Sauron and the Shire would never have been restored…

… If there is a theme of WWII, then it is closer to Nietzsche's theme of those who fight monsters becoming them.

All this allegory stuff is interesting in it’s own right, and I don’t doubt there’s some truth to it, but doesn’t it cut against the central theme of the book?

In The Strength to Dream, Colin Wilson castigates LoR and fantasy works in general for having a (literally) infantile view of evil – in which evil is an absolute force in the world which can be fought against and even destroyed.

It seems to me the very strength of the book is that it does the absolute opposite. Charles’ Nietzche quote is more on the money. The Ring represents power and the removal of the self from the web of social life (hence invisibility). There’s no neat get-outs such as pacifism, it’s a world where evil must be fought. The very stuff you need to do to fight evil makes you evil. Hence Ursula le Guin’s famous remark that almost all the major characters have a shadow self (Frodo/ Gollum and so on).

Lord of the Rings is at root a fable, which contains elements of allegory.

I went to look this up and still didn’t find the right quote! Here’s what I did dig up…

“For those who seek allegory it (LoR) must be maddening.” The Staring Eye, 1974

(LoR is a) “psychic journey”. “You see a group of figures, each one with it’s black shadow. Against the Elves, the Orcs. Against Aragorn, the Black Rider. Against Gandalf, Saruman. And above all, against Frodo, Gollum…“The great fantasies, myths and tales are like dreams. Though they use words they work in the way music does: they short-circuit verbal reasoning and go straight to the thoughts that lie too deep to utter.” The Child and the Shadow, 1974

Both are collected in The Language of the Night, along with a longer list somewhere which goes into Boromir’s brother and other stuff I would remember if I remembered stuff. Still, Charles scores 2/3 which ain’t bad.

Originally posted by our estimable host:It scares me that Tolkien's legendarium (as we like to call it) has this much depth and complexity: that every time you study a passage, you find new connections which you hadn't spotted before.

Well of course if you stare into anything long enough you start seeing extra stuff there, including (quite literally) a blank sheet of paper. So are Andrew and his Oxmoot chums engaged in some great weekend-long Rorschach blot test? The answer is yes of course, but who cares? I don’t imagine this diminishes either Tolkein’s writings or the way they’re treating them. I don’t believe LoR was written as a closed system which Tolkein hoped you’d persevere with until you ‘got’. Consciously or not, he was writing an open system which allowed you to both bring stuff to and take away from. It’s not a can of cherry coke you open, absorb the contents and discard. Consequently, it’s the fantasy novel nearest to the cherished prize of being comparable to folklore.

(Where fandom scares me is when it does the opposite – insist that the object of their fixations is a closed box which only they are capable of unlocking.)

Even if I was up for seeing the book allegorically I couldn’t see the Elves as English because I can’t see them as human. The book always keeps them at something of a distance, always otherly, often seen through another’s eyes (often Sam’s). Hobbits, Dwarfs, Orcs and maybe even Gandalf can be made human at a stretch. But the Elves are depicted as beings of spirit, encapsulating without embodying qualities we can only aspire to. They’re a mixture of Christian Angels with the faerie-folk of folklore.

Dungeons and Dragons and schlock fantasy elves always seem to be pointy eared humans. They are just humans with different abilities and lifespan, but the same motivations and drive. Tolkien's elves are different. He somehow succeeded in making them other.